Information about increase of spam in Fedora Infrastructure

[Kevin Fenzi]

Greetings. 

Over the last few months there has been a large increase in spam
submitted to some Fedora Infrastructure services, mostly focused on
fedorahosted trac (wiki and tickets) and the Fedora project wiki.
(They have also begun targeting bugzilla.redhat.com, please report any
spams there to
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&version=4.4)

To combat this flood of spam we have created an automated spam
detection and cleanup service called Basset (https://pagure.io/basset)

Basset hooks into our infrastructure in a number of places:

* Into the Fedora Account System (FAS). Basset may decide based on a
  number of factors that a new account does not appear legitimate and
  mark it 'spamcheck_denied' or 'spamcheck_manual' (it's not sure).
New
  account holders that find themselves with this status should get an
  email asking them to mail accounts(a)fedoraproject.org to reset and
  retrain Basset. 

* Into trac ticket and wiki submissions. When spam tickets or wiki
  edits are noted, the user is moved to 'spamcheck_denied' status,
  their edits or tickets are deleted. If you see a spam ticket or wiki
  edit that is older than an hour or so please let us know and we can
  train Basset on it. Otherwise, please leave such tickets and edits
  alone, or Basset may mark your account as well for editing the spam. 

* Into other services soon as well that spammers may target. 

Please do let us know at admin(a)fedoraproject.org or via a
infrastructure trac ticket
( https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ ) if you find any
spam not deleted/cleaned up, or users mis-marked. Do allow Basset
a few minutes processing time however. 

kevin